I'm your host, Jester. I've been an EVE Online player for about six years. One of my four mains is Ripard Teg, pictured at left. Sadly, I've succumbed to "bittervet" disease, but I'm wandering the New Eden landscape (and from time to time, the MMO landscape) in search of a cure.You can follow along, if you want...

Monday, March 10, 2014

CSM8 Status Report: Week forty-four

Let's go ahead and start with election stuff, since these posts are becoming a convenient place to keep track of that. CCP Dolan created a new section of the CSM area of the forums, "CSM Campaigns" where all the campaign threads have been moved. We're up to 36 candidates listed in there, but I'm pretty sure a few of them are full-on trolls (Erotica 1 comes to mind...) and a few more are unlikely to gain much if any support. So call it 30 or so serious candidates vying for CSM9's fourteen chairs.

Mike Azariah pointed me at this excellent reference to the CSM9 candidate interviews done by podcasts to date. Legacy of a Capsuleer leads the pack so far with an even dozen, and Cap Stable has done five including interviews of three candidates not interviewed by the first. Go out and listen to the interviews for candidates that appeal to you! Hopefully as we get closer to the end of March and into April, everyone or nearly everyone will consent to being interviewed. Call it at most three weeks until the actual election mechanics begin in earnest! Six weeks or so until elections close, seven weeks to Fanfest.

As usual, I'll be doing three posts once the official candidates list is out: my endorsements, who I think will win, and why I think the others won't. And I'm sure I'll have a few things to say about the election itself as it gets rolling.

That does remind me: a number of candidates pinged me this week with questions, requests for information, or asking for advice. I certainly welcome this! While I've tried to be as open as I can in these weekly posts plus the occasional add-on post tagged "CSM8", if you have specific questions about running, or what being on the CSM is like, I'm more than happy to answer those questions. Feel free to catch me in-game or send me an EVE mail.

CSM8 got some good news from Dolan this past week: the Minutes are back in our hands for final editing! A number of CSM members spent their weekends going over the text suggesting edits to Ali Aras, who is handling the final edits. That reminds me that I need to get my own edits to her sometime tonight. We expect to send this back to Dolan for final approval and publishing hopefully this week.

The date for the fifth of a planned six CSM8 Town Halls has been set! CSM Town Hall #5 will take place:

Sunday, 23 March at 1900 EVE time

Details and instructions, as always, are included in the town hall announcement thread on Jita Park. We'll be continuing to use the quite successful dual format, relying on EVE University's Mumble server for chat and text questions, and EVE Radio for broadcasting. I want to yet again thank Neville Smit of E-UNI and DJ Wiggles of EVE Radio who have helped make this format so effective and successful! If you have any questions you'd like to submit for this town hall, please send them to myself in EVE mail or in the EVE-O forum thread.

Some members of the CSM were able to make it to a scheduled meeting with a particularly high-placed CCP executive. I was unfortunately not able to attend because the time chosen for the meeting was laughably inconvenient for me. Let's just say that it gave the term "alarm clock op" an entirely new meaning, and I've never been particularly good at those. Still, those of us who couldn't make it were promised a recording of the proceedings which we are going to start pestering Dolan for... now.

As with the last few weeks, Skype continues to be rather quiet with the devs that usually haunt the place busy working, both on final tweaks for the Rubicon point release this week and summer expansion features. The private section of the forums continued to be quite busy with five or six different threads (including the last couple of versions of the ship painting pilot program thread which is now public) running the gamut of summer features and areas where CCP wanted some expert feedback.

And that... is all I can think of for now. It was actually a pretty busy week, CSM-wise!

Erotica 1 is a disgusting human being. I wish he were not part of my EVE. Matter of fact, I believe he is representative of the continuing slide of EVE default culture into one that most people would not want to be associated with.

I've shared my thoughts about him in private to CCP, but I think I'll make those thoughts public.

Eve is complicated and sometimes it's not clear who won... so who's upset is usually a good indicator. So tears = victory, and that leads to people trying to maximize the tears and that leads to rather brutish behaviour.

For those of us who prefer to get our information through text, is there an inventory anywhere of good places to look up candidates (aside from the ones who are bloggers), or do we pretty much just get whatever goes on in the EVE-O forum threads?

As the elections move closer and the actual requirements to CCP happen, I think more people will write their opinions and endorsements across the various sites and blogs. We have not yet received the rules or had people submit (or fail to) their info to CCP to see what the first round will look like.

its a pity that being a serial pest like Erotica 1 does not have penalty clause. maybe if at day one of hat into the ring - it came with the actual name and identity of the player; this clown and James315 would not waste communities time with attention seeking.

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